“The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.” — Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN)

My commenters got it right, that stump is pure resinous fatlighter. I think it's about a $150 worth, comparing it to what it costs from LLBean. I usually find them where a pine tree died standing and the resin ran back into the stump, then the tree decayed. I hadn't seen one in a couple of years and was happy to find it just walking through the woods.

"Coniferous tree sap is a viscousliquid, that contains terpene, a volatile compound which is a type of hydrocarbon. Over time the evaporation of the terpene changes the state of the sap; it slowly gets thicker until it hardens into resin.
New fatwood leaks the sticky sap, while in aged fatwood the sap has
hardened and is no longer sticky. At every stage of the aging process,
fatwood will burn readily, even when wet."

Sunday, August 30, 2015

I was out cutting what will be the last load of wood I need for this winter. It's always a good feeling to have the wood stacked. Every year I wonder if I can still do it with a saw and a splitting maul. I don't know how many more years I have, but at least this year, I still had it.

While walking around the woods, looking at the signs of summer ending, I noticed this stump. It was a couple of hundred yards from where the truck was, but I went back out and got the saw. Here's what it looked like on the truck. Next weekend I will split and cut this into very small pieces. It will probably be enough to start every fire we have this winter. I'll take some shavings and put them in a pill bottle in the bottom of my pack, too.

Rather than working on the house, we took the motorcycle out. Roswell to Jasper on the back roads is about as pretty as it gets, and I need to get more miles under the wheels.

There's a western wear store on Rt 5 just as you come into Jasper - it's a proper western wear store, as half of it sells livestock feed. And they had this, which cracked me up:

Not what you'd expect to find in Massachusetts, but par for the course in the north Georgia hills.

Then on to Rocco's bar where there were a dozen bikes parked out front and a Blues band playing B. B. King inside. They were crazy good - it seems like local boys who like to get paid to have fun.

And yes, it was we that rode. Co-blogger ASM826 was wrong when he said there are no women who want to meet men on the Internet. Her kids call her the "Queen of the World" because she told them when they were little that all the fireworks on July 4 were because of her birthday. Yes, she has as strange a sense of humor as I do, but we both seem to roll with each other's foibles. And she likes to ride with me.

Pretty good excuse to play hookey if you ask me. Sure beats painting the living room.

"It all sort of came through Huma. Who is Huma married to? One of the
great sleazebags of our time, Anthony Weiner. ... Now think of it. So Huma is getting
classified secrets. She’s married to Anthony Weiner, who’s a perv. No,
he is. He is. So she’s married. Now, these are confidential documents,
she’s married to this guy, and guess what happens to Anthony Weiner?

A
month ago, I see he went to work for a public relations firm. Can you
believe it? Now if you think if Huma isn’t telling Anthony, who she is
probably desperately in love with, in all fairness to Anthony, ’cause
why else would she marry this guy, can you believe it? Can’t see
straight. But if you were, look, think of it. So Huma’s got a lot of
stuff, it’s coming through Huma, she’s got a lot of information, who
knows. So she’s married to a bad guy.

I’ve known Anthony Weiner for a
long time, I knew him before they caught him with the “bing bing bing,”
and he was a bad guy then, and it turns out, he was a really bad guy. So
she’s married to Anthony Weiner. Do you think there’s even a 5% chance
that she’s not telling Anthony Weiner, now of a public relations firm,
what the hell is coming across? Do you think there’s even a little bit
of a chance? I don’t think so."

America is a melting pot, and so is our music. Country came from a mixing of many styles, including Gospel, Appalachian hill music, and western "Cowboy" music. This morphed into Honky-Tonk, which became (with a smattering of Blues) the kernel of Rock 'n Roll. The early days of Rock saw a lot of crossover artists - part Country, part Rock.

Roy Orbison was one of those artists. This was one of his first songs that hit the Billboard charts. It was influenced by the work he did with the "Nashville Sound" of Patsy Cline, but still has clear Honky Tonk roots. I can imagine what this would have sounded like with Hank Senior singing it.

Friday, August 28, 2015

I wish you bunch of sold-out, jaded, burned-out hacks would just go
home and let some people who still have some vision and whose
consciences haven't been seared past the point of reminding them when
they're wrong take over and start to claw this nation back on to the
path of sanity,

Your ratings are in the single digits, your
morals are in the gutter, your minds are on self-preservation and
somewhere along the way you traded your honor for political expediency.

You've violated your oaths, you've betrayed your country you've
feathered your nests and you've sat on your hands while an imperial
president has rubbed your noses in the dirt time after time.

You're no longer men, you're puppets, you're caricatures, jokes, a
gaggle of fading prostitutes for sale to anybody who can do you a
political favor.

OAKLAND, Calif.—Weeks after Ars published a feature on the scope of license plate reader use, the Oakland Police Department unilaterally and quietly decided to impose a data retention limit of six months.

...

According to Sgt. Dave Burke, who is in charge of the city’s LPR system, this change was not in response to Ars’ article, but rather was made primarily because the LPR computer—a Windows XP computer with an 80GB hard drive—was full and apparently "kept crashing."

"We had no money in the budget to buy an additional server," he told Ars.

They collected almost 5 Million license plate scans, and only stopped because the procurement bureaucracy has essentially infinite impedence.

"We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested," Burke added. "You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

"What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more
dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched
wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of
31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the
database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every
woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them
with badly-designed robots."

Repeat after me, "There are no women that want to meet men on the internet.."

Computer programming culture (called "hacker" culture in the days before the term got co-opted by Black Hats; these were the original guys who figured out how to code supercomputers, the computers that landed Our Guys on the Moon, and who created the Internet) had a bunch of puns and plays on words. This isn't surprising when you consider that most of these hackers were exceptionally bright and thought in ways very different from the mainstream.

You can find a huge collection of these in the Jargon File (highly recommended reading, but you are warned that you will lose hours reading through this). Looking at the Donald Trump phenomenon, one of these sayings came to mind:

[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only
Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly
captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to
parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and
perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that
are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many
examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the
entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by
hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a
person as an outsider, a wannabee, or in
larval stage. For further enlightenment on this
subject, consult any Zen master. See also
hacker humor, and koan.

I think that Trump entered the campaign in a ha-ha-only-serious way: an ironic joke with a hard core of disquieting truth. He was the only one on the stage who would say what the Political Class refused to say but what a large part of the Republic believed in their heart of hearts - but were not permitted to say in "polite society" because shut up, hater.

And every time he opens his mouth and emits what the Political Class deems to be a "gaffe", his poll numbers go up. I don't think that anyone understands this, including Trump. However, half of having luck is getting yourself in a position where you can be lucky, and my opinion is that Trump is almost certainly too opportunistic to let an opportunity like this pass.

I'm not the only one who seems to think this way. Heartiste (WARNING!!! Site is extremely non politically correct and many people - including perhaps all of my Lady Readers - are very likely to be offended by other posts there. This post is entirely safe except for Democrats) posts an email tip that he received from someone claiming insider knowledge about Trumps campaign:

I just got told by a friend that Trump hired the former lawfirm of the RNC.Why does this matter?Word on the street in Chattanooga (where Trump has and retains
many high end connections) is that Trump went into the campaign with two
intentions.One was to ‘shake things up’.The second was to raise his profile with Chinese investors for fund raising for a new casino.He really didn’t intend to get big numbers in the US and didn’t
intend to actually ‘go for the goal.’ Which was why he came in with no
primary ground game. He didn’t intend to even get 5%.With the recent success the question was ‘what now?’ Go for
closing the deal or back out? Some of his more inflammatory comments
were tests to see if he could flame out. And his poll numbers just rise.If he has retained a political lawfirm it can only be to create a ground game.

There's a lot more about how this is very, very different from the way that the GOP Establishment runs campaigns. If true, it may be game changing - it would certainly be very difficult for the Political Class to combat this. Heartiste comments:

I don’t doubt Trump entered this race thinking he couldn’t win, and that
his initial motivation was partly narcissistic (in fact all politicians
are narcissists to a degree), partly self-aggrandizement. But then he
saw that he could win, and that he had tapped a deep well of
dissatisfaction among people by simply speaking his mind the way he
likes to speak (i.e., not like a weeping p***y).

The level of dissatisfaction with the Political Class in this country is at epidemic proportions. The Political Class has assumed that if they offer the populace no real choice, that they can continue with their binge of crony capitalism and keep getting away with their lies. And now someone has tapped into that dissatisfaction in a way that they may not be able to thwart.

Is this a good thing? Beats me - he seems a bit Caesarish for my taste. But the screams of the Political Class (including the media, but I repeat myself) are deafening. Remember, it's the kicked dog that yelps, and I have precisely zero sympathy for any of them.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Firefighters who responded to a hotel blaze stumbled upon a
blood-spattered hotel room littered with bottles of alcohol and even a
piece of a scalp.

Police Chief J.R. Blyth, who was called in to
investigate, described the discovery at the George Washington Hotel in
Pittsburgh as 'the most grisly murder scene in his 35 years in law
enforcement'.

Detectives had spent eight hours of overtime on
the investigation before Chief Blyth realised the blood wasn’t real and
that the murder scene was in fact the leftover set of a horror movie
filmed two years ago with Corey Haim.

I guess that the Pittsburgh PD don't have many officers who are fans of B-grade horror flicks.

From the now declassified documents collected after the war, the link is a detailed post of just what the Japanese had kept in reserve and how far they were going to go to defend their home islands. The link has our plans and the Japanese plans, I am going to copy a larger section than I normally would as a quote* about the Japanese defenses. This is my answer to all the people who look back without any historical data and say we should not have used the nukes.

What the military leaders did not know was that by the end of July
the Japanese had been saving all aircraft, fuel, and pilots in reserve,
and had been feverishly building new planes for the decisive battle for
their homeland. As part of Ketsu-Go, the name for the plan to defend
Japan — the Japanese were building 20 suicide takeoff strips in southern
Kyushu with underground hangars. They also had 35 camouflaged
airfields and nine seaplane bases.

On the night before the expected invasion, 50 Japanese seaplane
bombers, 100 former carrier aircraft and 50 land based army planes were
to be launched in a suicide attack on the fleet. The Japanese had 58
more airfields in Korea, western Honshu and Shikoku, which also were to
be used for massive suicide attacks.

Allied intelligence had established that the Japanese had no more
than 2,500 aircraft of which they guessed 300 would be deployed in
suicide attacks. In August 1945, however, unknown to Allied
intelligence, the Japanese still had 5,651 army and 7,074 navy aircraft,
for a total of 12,725 planes of all types. Every village had some type
of aircraft manufacturing activity. Hidden in mines, railway tunnels,
under viaducts and in basements of department stores, work was being
done to construct new planes.

Additionally, the Japanese were building newer and more effective
models of the Okka, a rocket propelled bomb much like the German V-1,
but flown by a suicide pilot. When the invasion became imminent,
Ketsu-Go called for a fourfold aerial plan of attack to destroy up to
800 Allied ships. While Allied ships were approaching Japan, but still
in the open seas, an initial force of 2,000 army and navy fighters were
to fight to the death to control the skies over Kyushu. A second force
of 330 navy combat pilots were to attack the main body of the task force to keep it
from using its fire support and air cover to protect the troop carrying
transports.While these two forces were engaged, a third force of 825
suicide planes was to hit the American transports.

As the invasion convoys approached their anchorages, another 2,000
suicide planes were to be launched in waves of 200 to 300 , to be used
in hour by hour attacks. By mid-morning of the first day of the
invasion, most of the American land-based aircraft would be forced to
return to their bases, leaving the defense against the suicide planes to
the carrier pilots and the shipboard gunners.

Carrier pilots crippled by fatigue would have to land time and time
again to rearm and refuel. Guns would malfunction from the heat of
continuous firing and ammunition would become scarce. Gun crews would
be exhausted by nightfall, but still the waves of kamikaze would
continue. With the fleet hovering off the beaches, all remaining
Japanese aircraft would be committed to nonstop suicide attacks, which
the Japanese hoped could be sustained for 10 days. The Japanese planned
to coordinate their air strikes with attacks from the 40 remaining
submarines from the Imperial Navy — some armed with Long Lance torpedoes
with a range of 20 miles — when the invasion fleet was 180 miles off Kyushu.

The Imperial Navy had 23 destroyers and two cruisers which were
operational. These ships were to be used to counterattack the American
invasion. A number of the destroyers were to be beached at the last
minute to be used as anti-invasion gun platforms. Once offshore, the
invasion fleet would be forced to defend not only against the attacks
from the air, but would also be confronted with suicide attacks from
sea. Japan had established a suicide naval attack unit of midget
submarines, human torpedoes and exploding motorboats.

The goal of the Japanese was to shatter the invasion before the
landing. The Japanese were convinced the Americans would back off or
become so demoralized that they would then accept a less-than-unconditional surrender and a more honorable and face-saving
end for the Japanese. But as horrible as the battle of Japan would be
off the beaches, it would be on Japanese soil that the American forces
would face the most rugged and fanatical defense encountered during the
war.

Throughout the island-hopping Pacific campaign, Allied troops had
always out numbered the Japanese by 2 to 1 and sometimes 3 to 1. In
Japan it would be different. By virtue of a combination of cunning,
guesswork, and brilliant military reasoning, a number of Japan’s top
military leaders were able to deduce, not only when, but where, the
United States would land its first invasion forces.

Facing the 14 American divisions landing at Kyushu would be 14
Japanese divisions, 7 independent mixed brigades, 3 tank brigades and
thousands of naval troops. On Kyushu the odds would be 3 to 2 in favor
of the Japanese, with 790,000 enemy defenders against 550,000 Americans.
This time the bulk of the Japanese defenders would not be the poorly
trained and ill-equipped labor battalions that the Americans had faced
in the earlier campaigns.

The Japanese defenders would be the hard core of the home army. These
troops were well-fed and well equipped. They were familiar with the
terrain, had stockpiles of arms and ammunition, and had developed an
effective system of transportation and supply almost invisible from the
air. Many of these Japanese troops were the elite of the army, and they
were swollen with a fanatical fighting spirit. Japan’s network of beach
defenses consisted of offshore mines, thousands of suicide scuba divers attacking landing craft, and mines planted on the beaches. Coming
ashore, the American Eastern amphibious assault forces at Miyazaki would
face three Japanese divisions, and two others poised for counter
attack. Awaiting the Southeastern attack force at Ariake Bay was an
entire division and at least one mixed infantry brigade.

On the western shores of Kyushu, the Marines would face the most
brutal opposition. Along the invasion beaches would be the three
Japanese divisions, a tank brigade, a mixed infantry brigade and an
artillery command. Components of two divisions would also be poised to
launch counterattacks. If not needed to reinforce the primary landing
beaches, the American Reserve Force would be landed at the base of
Kagoshima Bay November 4, where they would be confronted by two mixed
infantry brigades, parts of two infantry divisions and thousands of naval troops.

All along the invasion beaches, American troops would face coastal
batteries, anti-landing obstacles and a network of heavily fortified
pillboxes, bunkers, and underground fortresses. As Americans waded ashore, they would face intense artillery and mortar fire as they worked
their way through concrete rubble and barbed-wire entanglements
arranged to funnel them into the muzzles of these Japanese guns.
On the beaches and beyond would be hundreds of Japanese machine gun
positions, beach mines, booby traps, trip-wire mines and sniper units.
Suicide units concealed in “spider holes” would engage the troops as
they passed nearby. In the heat of battle, Japanese infiltration units
would be sent to reap havoc in the American lines by cutting phone and
communication lines. Some of the Japanese troops would be in American
uniform, English-speaking Japanese officers were assigned to break in on American radio traffic to call off artillery fire, to order retreats and to further confuse troops.
Other infiltration with demolition charges strapped on their chests
or backs would attempt to blow up American tanks, artillery pieces and
ammunition stores as they were unloaded ashore.

Beyond the beaches were large artillery pieces situated to bring down
a curtain of fire on the beach. Some of these large guns were mounted
on railroad tracks running in and out of caves protected by concrete and
steel. The battle for Japan would be won by what Simon Bolivar
Buckner, a lieutenant general in the Confederate army during the Civil
War, had called “Prairie Dog Warfare.” This type of fighting was almost
unknown to the ground troops in Europe and the Mediterranean. It was
peculiar only to the soldiers and Marines who fought the Japanese on islands all
over the Pacific — at Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Prairie Dog Warfare was a battle for yards, feet and sometimes
inches. It was brutal, deadly and dangerous form of combat aimed at an
underground, heavily fortified, non-retreating enemy. In the mountains
behind the Japanese beaches were underground networks of caves, bunkers,
command posts and hospitals connected by miles of tunnels with dozens
of entrances and exits. Some of these complexes could hold up to 1,000
troops. In addition to the use of poison gas and bacteriological warfare (which the Japanese had experimented with), Japan mobilized its citizenry.

Had Olympic come about, the Japanese civilian population, inflamed by
a national slogan – “One Hundred Million Will Die for the Emperor and
Nation” – were prepared to fight to the death. Twenty Eight Million
Japanese had become a part of the National Volunteer Combat Force. They
were armed with ancient rifles, lunge mines, satchel charges, Molotov
cocktails and one-shot black powder mortars. Others were armed with
swords, long bows, axes and bamboo spears. The civilian units were to
be used in nighttime attacks, hit and run maneuvers, delaying actions
and massive suicide charges at the weaker American positions. At the
early stage of the invasion, 1,000 Japanese and American soldiers would
be dying every hour.

*To the owners of the original post: I tried to register on your site and ask permission for using such an expansive quote. I do not know what the problem was, but I was unsuccessful. If you find this and have a issue with it, please contact me and I will take it down.

One thing seems perfectly clear, though. We’ve been instructed for years
that our patriotic duty is to fear and hate these invariably
incompetent people, to live in terror lest they attack us, and to accept
that it’s in our sheeplike interest to give up a little convenience –
in the form of all our liberty and privacy – so that our beloved
government may provide us the security of a well-run prison. But every
time one of these would-be tragedies actually happens – as opposed to
being something feds set up some kid to do – but becomes a feel-good
story instead, it’s because somebody who hasn’t been spying on
you or shooting your dog sees what’s going down, puts on his big-boy
pants, and thumps the bad guy soundly his own unauthorized self.

It wasn't Marines, it was post 9/11 Americans, an Air Force Airman, a National Guardsman, and a civilian. Armed with just their bodies and the will to resist.

Remember. There will be more of this and some of it will be here.

Sadler told The Associated Press that they saw a train employee sprint down the aisle followed by a gunman with an automatic rifle. As he was cocking it to shoot it, Alek just yells, 'Spencer, go!' And Spencer runs down the aisle, Sadler said. "Spencer makes first contact, he tackles the guy, Alek wrestles the gun away from him, and the gunman pulls out a boxcutter and slices Spencer a few times. And the three of us beat him until he was unconscious."

Now, according to a report in Wired, that a host of similar systems used by other car manufacturers are vulnerable to similar attacks:

Over the last week, Kamkar has analyzed the iOS apps of
BMW’s Remote, Mercedes-Benz mbrace, Chrysler Uconnect, and the alarm
system Viper’s Smartstart, and found that all of those
internet-connected vehicle services are vulnerable to the attack he used
to hack GM’s OnStar RemoteLink app.

"If you’re using any of these four apps, I can automatically get all
of your log-in information and then indefinitely authenticate as you,"
says Kamkar. "These apps give me different levels of control of your
car. But they all give me some amount of control."

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Lou Gehrig his his 23rd career grand slam. That record was to stand for 75 years until it was broken by Alex Rodriguez. There is no record as to whether Gehrig also used performance enhancing drugs. And since we're talking about A-Rod, here is a musical homage to his career:

It also seems that there was no verification done on email addressed used in site signup. This means that anyone could create an account for, say, jeb.bush@state.fl.us and it would be in the database that was just released. There's an interesting attack that security guys call "Information Poisoning", where the attack is intended to create distrust in a community or data set. If you can inject enough distrust, then you can render the resource worthless.

Given the recent OPM hack, I'm starting to wonder if this is the wave of the future - injection of embarrassing data into sites like this and then a subsequent hack to expose said data. Certainly the capability exists to do this sort of thing.

As I clean up and sort through the lower reaches of Camp Borepatch, I find long lost wonders. One was some Kodak slide carousels. A couple were slides taken by my late Father-in-Law; the ex will be wanting these, no doubt. One was slides taken by me no doubt on a vacation around 1990 or so - I posted some of these here, and these are very likely of the same vintage.

But one was slides. As in, Presentation Slides. On Network Security. Circa 1994-1995.

[blink] [blink]

I'm trying to remember when I had these made and for which venue, but two decades are somewhat thwarting my memory.

To add to the feeling of "old fartness", it seems that the crazy hipsters use the term "slidemanship" for something out of Mario Kart. Back In The Day it was the process of establishing dominance over your audience by first establishing dominance over your projectionist. Somewhere I have a hilarious writeup about that, which involves backwards slides, slides that are two pieces of film stuck together with wax that slide apart and de-focus when the heat of the lamp melts it, obscure references in Cyrillic typefonts ("Russian? No, no - Bulgarian, old chap!").

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

“The time for debate has ended”
— Marcia McNutt (editor-in-Chief of Science, next President of the NAS) in “The beyond-two-degree inferno“, editorial in Science, 3 July 2015.

I agree with McNutt: the public policy debate has ended. Climate
science as an institution is broken, the larger science community
applauds its dysfunctionality, and a critical mass of the US public has
lost confidence in it. As a result, the US will take no substantial
steps to prepare for possible future climate change, not even preparing
for the inevitable re-occurrence of past extreme weather.

It is a sad state of affairs for climate science that this book [Mark Steyn's new book on Michael Mann of "Hockey Stick" fame - Borepatch] had to
be written (it was brought on by Michael Mann’s lawsuit – without the
lawsuit, Steyn obviously wouldn’t have bothered). At a time when the
U.S. and the world’s nations are trying to put together an agreement to
tackle climate change (for better or for worse), Steyn’s book reminds
everyone of Climategate, why the public doesn’t trust climate scientists
and aren’t buying their ‘consensus.

H/T to Yahoo! Tech
for the story. As usual, the problem is government. In particular,
after the "Hanging Chad" election in 2000, the congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
Among other things, the Act banned punched-card and mechanical-lever
voting machines. This led to the inevitable gold rush to suck up that
gubmint money by producing voting machines. And just as the War on Some
Drugs money has always been spent so wisely; like the Quadro Tracker, the $1000 empty box with a 'diving rod' on it, so was spent the Help America Vote money.

It was so bad that Virginia has banned their use because the security is so wretched:

If an election was held using the AVS WinVote, and it wasn’t hacked, it
was only because no one tried. The vulnerabilities were so severe, and
so trivial to exploit, that anyone with even a modicum of training could
have succeeded. They didn’t need to be in the polling place – within a
few hundred feet (e.g., in the parking lot) is easy, and within a half
mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can. Further,
there are no logs or other records that would indicate if such a thing
ever happened, so if an election was hacked any time in the past, we
will never know.

How bad was it? How about the shiny key to lock the machine? Epstein
reports “All the keys are the same for every Winvote that’s ever been
made, because that way it’s easier,”

•
Winvote’s machine runs a version of Windows XP that hasn’t had patches
installed since 2004 — four years before AVS deservedly went out of
business.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

August 1940 saw the German Luftwaffe try to establish air superiority over Great Britain. Hitler's planned invasion of that island was running out of time - the English Channel gets notoriously stormy in the autumn, and mid-August was getting perilously close to autumn. But Hermann Goering assured the Fuhrer that he had the Royal Air Force on the ropes. One more big push would break RAF Fighter Command.

August 18 was that big push.

But it didn't go that way. Hundreds of RAF Fighters rose to savage the German bombers. While this "Hardest Day" was just about exactly a draw in terms of losses, it showed that the RAF was most definitely not on the ropes. While the Battle of Britain would go on for weeks, Hitler's mind was already shifting to the Eastern Front. In Churchill's immortal words, never had so many owed so much to so few, those who flew sortie after sortie on that Hardest Day.

Three Quarters of a Century later, those Few are few indeed. Per Ardua ad Astra, indeed.

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped
the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics,
focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new
idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I
don’t think he put much effort into it. Imagine what he could do if he
gave up golf.

As far as I can tell, Trump’s “crazy talk” is always
in the correct direction for a skilled persuader. When Trump sets
an “anchor” in your mind, it is never random. And it seems to work every
time.

Now that Trump owns FOX, and I see how well his anchor
trick works with the public, I’m going to predict he will be our next
president. I think he will move to the center on social issues (already
happening) and win against Clinton in a tight election.

I also saw
some Internet chatter about the idea of picking Mark Cuban as Vice
Presidential running mate. If that happens, Republicans win. And I think
they like to win. There is no way Trump picks some desiccated Governor
from an important state as his running mate. I think Cuban is a
realistic possibility.

Trump is a complicated subject... because its insane... but the
situation is so nutty that he starts to make sense... which tells you
how insane the situation is...

Americans are furious. Both sides of the political spectrum.

Republicans are pissed.

Democrats are pissed.

No one trusts anyone.

Both side's politicians are full of shit.

There is a general consensus that the elites are fucking over the people at large.

The
republicans tried to purge their own party with the "tea party" and
similar things.

Democrats only see this form their perspective but they
don't realize that a fair amount of the animus was directed at the
establishment republicans which is why the establishment doesn't like
the tea party.

The democrats tried to purge their own party with stuff like code pink, occupy wall street, and now black lives matter.

And
all of this is failing. The Establishment of both parties is very good
at stonewalling this stuff. Black Lives Matter shows up to a Bernie
speech and basically takes it over.

They try the same thing at a Hillary
speech and they don't even get in the front door.

Think about that.

And that's basically what has been going on. So what is Donald Trump?

In
my view, he's a purgative. A drug you take to induce vomiting. You
accidentally eat poison... it has to get out. So you take a purgative...
and you vomit.

The Tea Party failed, because it was subverted by the Establishment. I was a fan of "Vote Them All Out", but that failed because the Establishment funded the primary races to keep reformers out.

The Slashdot commenter puts his finger on the dynamic that Trump has tapped into. Everyone hates the government and the politicians. Everyone. Up until now it's been irrelevant, since the Establishment has not allowed any alternative.

But Trump doesn't need them, and doesn't want them.

Julius Caesar was a master of New Media, back in the Roman Republic days. His Gallic War was widely distributed in Rome (by Caesar's allies) and became wildly popular. Caesar looked different from the corrupt Senate establishment. People were sick of the Status Quo.

Caesar didn't need the Senate, because he had the public. When it was a choice of the Senatus or the Populusque Romanus, the Status Quo collapsed. Whether that was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing has been the subject of debate for two millennia.

Adams again:

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped
the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics,
focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new
idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I
don’t think he put much effort into it.

My estimation of Trump has gone way, way up. This is new, and significant, and I'm not sure if any of the other candidates have any idea how to deal with him other than hoping that he gets bored and leaves, or makes a set of gaffes that will cause him to implode. That's not looking like where the smart money is betting.

Would a Trump Presidency be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? There's a pretty good chance that we're fixin' to find out. But Trump is focused on what the market wants, and what the political market wants right now is a change from the Status Quo. And quite frankly, there are quite a few Agencies where "You're Fired" would not only be effective in correcting the path the Republic is on, but would be wildly popular with the Populusque Americanus.

It's become the longest-running movie in history: literally, it's always
been playing in a cinema somewhere in the world since that date. No
other film in entertainment history can make that claim over so long a
period. In fact, RHPS has been called 'the most iconic cult movie of all time'.

I think I first went to see it in the late '70s, with 2cents. It was an eye-opener: not so much the movie (which was funny-in-a-schlocky-way) but the audience participation part. There were accepted catch phrases that the audience would holler at the screen: "Where's your neck?" (at the narrator). "Ass****!" at the male lead (Barry Bostwick; I could never watch his later performance as George Washington without hearing that whispering in the back of my head). You would fling props at the screen: rice at the wedding scene, toast at the banquet when Dr. Frank N. Furter (played by Tim Curry; I couldn't get that image out of my mind when I saw him in his later role in Hunt For Red October).

A couple years later, 2cents and I were at another screening. There were a group of guys in the row in front of us, and one of them was clearly at the movie for the first time - they were explaining all the audience participation parts to him. At the banquet scene, things played out sort of like this:

His friends, to him: The toast - where's the toast?

Him: I don't have it. I ate it.

2cents (and me), pointing at him: Ass****!

Good times, good times.

If you were a RHPS fan, click through to Peter's post, which will be a waltz down memory lane.

I can walk from Camp Borepatch to the Chattahoochee river. There are very nice trails through National Forrest parkland (the picture here is from this parkland), there's a lively riverside activity scene on the river. In all the years I've lived here, I'd never gone tubing on the 'Hooch. So we went last weekend.

Remember, it's August, so it's hotter than a hoochie coochie. You bet there's a country music song about that.

Alan Jackson was one of the stars that blazed brightly in the 1990s, with 35 Billboard #1 country hits. This was one, which won CMA song of the year in 1993. As a Georgia boy, he was familiar with the 'Hooch. Asked about the song, he said:

It's a song about having fun, growing up. and coming of age in a
small town - which really applies to anyone across the country, not just
by the Chattahoochee. We never thought it would be as big as it's
become."

Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie
We laid rubber on the Georgie asphalt
We got a little crazy but we never got caught

Down by the river on a friday night
A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight
Talking 'bout cars and dreaming 'bout women
Never had a plan just a livin' for the minute
Yeah way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
Never knew how much that muddy water meant to me
But I learned how to swim and I learned how I was
A lot about livin' and a litttle 'bout love

Well we fogged up the windows in my old chevy
I was willing but she wasn't ready
So a settled for a burger and a grape snowcone
Dropped her off early but I didn't go home

Down by the river on a friday night
A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight
Talking 'bout cars and dreaming 'bout women
Never had a plan just a livin' for the minute
Yeah way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
Never knew how much that muddy water meant to me
But I learned how to swim and I learned how I was
A lot about livin' and a little 'bout love

Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie
We laid rubber on the Georgie asphalt
We got a little crazy but we never got caught

Well we fogged up the windows in my old chevy
I was willing but she wasn't ready
So a settled for a burger and a grape snowcone
Dropped her off early but I didn't go home

Down by the river on a friday night
A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight
Talking 'bout cars and dreaming 'bout women
Never had a plan just a livin' for the minute
Yeah way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
Never knew how much that muddy water meant to me
But I learned how to swim and I learned how I was
A lot about livin' and a little 'bout love

Friday, August 14, 2015

Robert Kramer, the B-17 pilot remembered in the last post, was killed on his 3rd mission on 10 October 1943. He was listed asMIA for years. He had named the plane for his wife, Leona. It was mis-recorded as "Lena" in the after action report.

His plane was one of 313 bombers to make that raid. 30 of those bombers were lost. 13 of the lost planes came from the 100th Bomb Group.

From statements in the MACR file it would
appear three men were killed were unable to bail out prior to the ship
entering a spin and finally exploding. Gieger (Lt Hugh E. Gieger, Jr. )
said he personally examined the dog tags and they had the appearance of
being burned. Kramer (Lt Robert P. Kramer) was at the nose exit ready to
jump, when he turned back for one last verification all crew members
had bailed out. This gallant action cost the popular Bob Kramer his
life.

German reports pinpoint the crash site and
time as 1515 hours 10 Oct 1943 "at Lambeck near Wulfen, 100 meters north
of Schloss Lembeck. " Interment was on 14 Oct 1943 at Catholic
cemetery, Lambeck in Row #1 graves 10, 11 and 12.

Here's an example of what images mean to the people involved and how little they mean when separated from their context.

A technician who worked for Kodak in the early days of Kodachrome got some 16mm Kodachrome film and made movies of his hometown and his girl. The film was developed, marked as experimental, and then lost because the technician became a pilot in the Army Air Corps, went to Europe flying a B-17, and never returned.

The film was found in an attic and a local historian got to view it. The historian did his research and figured out who the people were. The young woman is now 96 years old and still living in the same town. The historian made contact and took the film to her. This is what a picture or a film can mean to someone:

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

1. Hillary is done. There is no longer any denying it. There's no rallying the base and blaming a vast right wing conspiracy. It's only a question of when she withdraws from the race and whether or not she can avoid being indicted.

.2 Joe Biden will run. Sensing the vacuum being created with Hillary's withdrawal (I mean the "OMG, Bernie is leading in New Hampshire polling" kind of vacuum) Uncle Joe will not be able to resist the siren's call.

This sets up the possibility, however remote, that the perfect storm of candidates will emerge in the race as we go into 2016. The candidates that the columnists, the talk show hosts, and yes, the voters, could count on for maximum entertainment value.

On Tuesday three Jeep Cherokee owners filed a complaint against both Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Harman International, the maker of the Uconnect dashboard computer in millions of Chrysler vehicles. A security flaw in that cellular-connected computer served as the entry point for security researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller when theyshowed WIRED last month that they could wirelessly hack into a 2014 Jeep over the internet to hijack its steering, brakes and transmission. Now the small group of plaintiffs is hoping to invite anyone with those vulnerable Uconnect systems in their car or truck to join them in their litigation. If their complaint is certified by a court as a class action, the broad spectrum of affected Chrysler vehicles means it could snowball into a case with more than a million potential plaintiffs.

What damages are assessed when it's no longer possible to have confidence in the security and integrity of your car? What are the damages if you always wonder if you're about to die when you start it up?

Black Hat 2015 For the past nine
years Black Hat has staged its Pwnie Awards, devoted to recognizing the
best and worst aspects of computer security, and this year's winner of
the least welcome award is the US government's Office of Personnel
Management.

The OPM won in the "Most EPIC Fail" category after hackers, possibly from the Chinese government, ransacked the agency's servers to steal confidential information on up to 21.5 million past and present government employees.

"The OPM let you and everyone else down. So much so,
that the USA government might actually be pulling covert agents out of
foreign countries. USA #1," noted the panel of judges.

The hack caused the resignation
of the OPM's head and a frantic effort by other government departments
to get themselves protected. No one from the OPM was present to pick up
their pony-shaped award.

Let's just let that run over the tongue, shall we? No one from the OPM was present to pick up
their pony-shaped award.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

It's the only time I've ever seen this and I wasn't planning it. We were camping in September of 2011 in S.C. and had gotten up early to see the sunrise. There were a couple of dozen turtles making their way to the sea. We kept the sea gulls and ghost crabs from taking any and watched them make their way to the water.

We were still on the beach when a ranger came out to check the nest. She had missed the hatching, but seemed relieved when we assured her that we had watched them make the sea. Here's one I managed to capture on video.

Krugman and Bernanke are walking down the street and see a pile of dog
s***. Bernanke says “I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars to eat that
pile of s***.” Krugman does it, gets paid, and they keep walking. After a
while they see another pile of s*** on the road. Seeing an opportunity
for revenge, Krugman says “Tell you what, I’ll give YOU twenty grand to
eat that pile of s***.”

Click through for the hilarious ending. And it's 100% true, which makes it even better.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Borepatch and I were discussing memories last night. He's going through old boxes, clearing out his house to put it on the market. It isn't just the work of opening boxes and sorting, throwing away or donating the unneeded. It's opening a box and finding a book and sitting there remembering reading that book 437 times to little kids before bedtime. It's coming across a box of pictures you haven't seen for 15 years and sitting there flipping through them ambushed by the memories they evoke.

It reminds you of who you were and what your dreams and plans were when you were young.

I took 35mm slides and pictures for years, always liked photography. I have births, birthdays, holidays, trips to the beach, my trips overseas, sometimes just a few quick shots taken on a summer day or playing in the snow in February. The slides are all in carousels, the pictures are in albums or in the paper envelopes they used to come back from the developer in. There are thousands of them.

No one wants them, really. I know the kids don't and who else could possibly care at all? My plan is to scan the best of them, a daunting task just to do a tithe of them, and to make some sense of it, write some text for each folder, put them in a file structure and then burn them to DVDs. I can make copies for each of them. And I know that they will never look at them all. One thing I'd have to do is make a short slide show with a few of the best ones and maybe they might look at it once. Maybe.

I have come to accept that these are my pictures and when I look at them they trigger memories for me, but these things that mean so much to me mean nothing to the rest of the world. I really don't know if there is any point in scanning them, but I understand that if I decide to do the work, it will be just for myself and my own satisfaction.

There a antique store/junk shop in town. I go in there at lunch time sometimes and walk around. In the back there is a table with some old film cameras and lenses and a big box full of photographs. They were all important to someone once. Now they are all jumbled together and you can have one for a dollar. They are disconnected from their history. You don't know who they are or anything about their lives beyond what the image reveals.

There's a lesson in that box about memories and the things we think we are preserving.

Four FireEye researchers have found a way to steal fingerprints from
Android phones packing biometric sensors such as the Samsung Galaxy S5
and the HTC One Max.

Oh, Come on I hear you say. This is a Security feature, I hear you say. Just how bad can it be?

The team found a forehead-slapping flaw in HTC One Max in which fingerprints are stored as an image file (dbgraw.bmp) in a open "world readable" folder.

"Any unprivileged processes or apps can steal user’s
fingerprints by reading this file," the team says, adding that the
images can be made into clear prints by adding some padding.

Well there's your problem, right there ...

$5 gets you $10 that it's not just Samsung and HTC. My advice is to turn off the damn fingerprint recognition and browse through the file system, deleting any .BMP files that look like biometrics. And maybe run the phone through an industrial shredder ...

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Listen to his words and the documented facts of the events of August 1945.

Okay, now you're back. My added thoughts:
If we had invaded Japan, we would have lost somewhere around a million Americans, killed tens of millions of Japanese and destroyed everything that remained of the infrastructure of the country. It would been far more suffering.

Additionally, we would had to pull out the bulk of our troops from Europe. In fact, that had started to happen. Veterans from the war in Europe were being brought home to camps in the U.S. to train and build new units for the planned invasion of the home islands of Japan. An incredible effort that would have made the Normandy invasion pale by comparison. This would have left Europe undefended. There would have been no Marshall Plan, all our resources would have been directed elsewhere.

Stalin's armies, far larger than the U.S. and Britain combined, would have been left to real with aftermath of the Nazi defeat.
I suspect Stalin would have rolled to the Atlantic unopposed. The Iron Curtain would have descended on all of Western Europe.

If Truman had the ability to use this weapon and not ordered it, he would have been guilty of the worst treason and culpable for all the additional deaths of American troops that would have occurred.

You stop a bad man by making a decision. That decision is all that will
matter until the future of everything being over arrives. Give no yield,
no quarter, no pause. Do nothing less than be victorious. There is no
shortage of bad men in the world and there will never be a shortage of
such men. But they, the creatures that go bump in the night, the wolves
at the door, are thwarted by decision and decisive action.

It's not caliber, capacity, polymer nor steel that overcomes the evil of this world but rather bravery.

Friday, August 7, 2015

EFF is excited to announce that today we are releasing version 1.0 of
Privacy Badger for Chrome and Firefox. Privacy Badger is a browser
extension that automatically blocks hidden trackers that would otherwise
spy on your browsing habits as you surf the Web.

...

As you browse the Web, Privacy Badger looks at any third party
domains that are loaded on a given site and determines whether or not
they appear to be tracking you (e.g. by setting cookies that could be
used for tracking, or fingerprinting your browser). If the same third
party domain appears to be tracking you on three or more different
websites, Privacy Badger will conclude that the third party domain is a
tracker and block future connections to it.

For certain websites, if Privacy Badger were to block an embedded
domain entirely it would break the site's core functionality. For
example, if Privacy Badger were to block 'licensebuttons.net,' Creative
Commons buttons would no longer load. In these cases Privacy Badger
blocks the domain from setting or receiving any cookies or 'referer'
headers, but allows the embedded content to load.

Pretty neat. I like the Electronic Frontier Foundation guys. Recommended.

This is the first of a new series of posts, highlighting oddball, unusual, and cool cars. In this post, we go back to the future with the first car in BMW's Z line of roadsters. It had so many unusual features that it led to the Z moniker itself, for Zukunft - "future".

Introduced at the 1987 Frankfurt Motor Show, the Z1's retractable doors and removable thermoplastic body panels made it the sensation of the show. BMW quickly received 5,000 orders before manufacturing even began.

The panels contributed nothing to the car's structural integrity, and were explicitly designed to be removable and swappable. BMW encouraged customers to purchase a second set of panels in a different color, letting them change their car themselves. BMW's claim that the swap would only take 40 minutes was considered to be rather a joke (if you weren't a Bavarian mechanic).

Alas, only 8,000 were built. The Z1 used a stock 2.5L engine (from the 325 series) and the 9 second 0-60 made this somewhat less than the ultimate driving machine. Only built between 1989 and 1991, they are quite rare and prices are correspondingly high. While this isn't by any means a performance car, it's terribly quirky - it's as close as BMW ever came to the Jeep Wrangler's removable doors. In Europe it's legal to drive with the doors retracted (it seems that it's not legal to do this here in the USA).

If you're interested in this unique motor, I recommend you click through to the excellent article at Topspeed.com.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

I am not a lawyer, but some lawyers (well, law professors) are looking at this and think that it may be justified:

Robots
can pose-or can appear to pose-a threat to life, property, and privacy.
May a landowner legally shoot down a trespassing drone? Can she hold a
trespassing autonomous car as security against damage done or further
torts? Is the fear that a drone may be operated by a paparazzo or a
peeping Tom sufficient grounds to disable or interfere with it? How hard
may you shove if the office robot rolls over your foot? This paper
addresses all those issues and one more: what rules and standards we
could put into place to make the resolution of those questions easier
and fairer to all concerned.

The default common-law legal rules
governing each of these perceived threats are somewhat different,
although reasonableness always plays an important role in defining legal
rights and options. In certain cases - drone overflights, autonomous
cars, national, state, and even local regulation - may trump the common
law. Because it is in most cases obvious that humans can use force to
protect themselves against actual physical attack, the paper
concentrates on the more interesting cases of (1) robot (and especially
drone) trespass and (2) responses to perceived threats other than
physical attack by robots notably the risk that the robot (or drone) may
be spying - perceptions which may not always be justified, but which
sometimes may nonetheless be considered reasonable in law.

We
argue that the scope of permissible self-help in defending one's privacy
should be quite broad. There is exigency in that resort to legally
administered remedies would be impracticable; and worse, the harm caused
by a drone that escapes with intrusive recordings can be substantial
and hard to remedy after the fact. Further, it is common for new
technology to be seen as risky and dangerous, and until proven otherwise
drones are no exception. At least initially, violent self-help will
seem, and often may be, reasonable even when the privacy threat is not
great - or even extant

The US Department of Homeland Security issued an intelligence
assessment to law enforcement agencies Friday warning that recreational
drones "could be used by adversaries" to attack the United States.

...

The report added that drones "could be used by adversaries to
leverage UAS as part of an attack" and that an "emerging adversary use
of Unmanned Aircraft Systems present detection and disruption
challenges."

And the Subject Line is:"Your USAA Account Computer/Device Preferences Notification."

DO NOT OPEN the email.DELETE THE EMAIL IMMEDIATELY.Then DELETE the email from your Deleted Items folder.The email contains a malicious link that can attack email and other Information Technology systems.

I have been getting email saying that I have a voice mail message. I don't use the app that the email claims to represent. If you get emails from what look like companies you don't use, they are almost certainly attacks. If you get "security" emails from companies that you do financial business with, they are almost certainly attacks.

Notice of Cookies

Cookies in use. If you're in the EU, consider this a warning. The is a Blogspot site, so Google runs the backend. I don't know what they are doing with the cookies and they're not saying. If you are concerned that Google is tracking you, you should never visit a Google Blogspot site, use Gmail, or use Google as a search engine.

If you are concerned about being tracked on the internet, you should log off, shut down your PC, move to a cabin in the woods, grow your own food, never visit a bank, use a cell phone, or drive a car made after 1999. Don't go outside and look up at the sky, either.

If you are visiting this site from a EU country, you should get an annoying popup at the top of the screen. If you want to see it, here it is in English: http://www.borepatch.blogspot.co.uk/